


The Hunter's Moon is Shining

by spellmotif (orchidhorror)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: But specifically Lup & Taako, F/M, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Twilight vampires, What if everyone was a vampire?, that's it that's the au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-22 21:30:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14317548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchidhorror/pseuds/spellmotif
Summary: Sometimes you're a vampire. Wow, that sucks, huh?





	1. CHAPTER I

**Author's Note:**

> Violence, implied child neglect, etc. It's Lup and Taako as vampires and pretty much exactly what you'd expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence, implied child neglect, etc. It's Lup and Taako as vampires and pretty much exactly what you'd expect.

 

Taako was always good at changing things. Sometimes this meant changing someone’s opinion just a touch easier, like getting his and Lup’s ever-changing foster family to let them stay out longer, or care a little less if they didn’t end up home at all. It wasn’t magic, it just helped.

Not to say Taako strictly  _ couldn’t _ do magic.

Sometimes changing things was literal. One day it meant sitting in front of Lup, the two of them living breathing mirrors, and just  _ changing _ . She didn’t need to use many words, “ _ the part where our jaws- , and the thing with the eyebrows- , the lip curve-” _ . Of course Taako understood her. When he changed her face it wasn’t obvious, nothing that would make them any less identical. Just a tug here and soften here and push this back.

What really changed was how much more she smiled after that.

Of course it didn’t stop there. There were shoulders and waists and complicated systems in the body that they spent hours hunched over a pile of textbooks just to figure out. (‘No, Taako, it’s not  _ literally _ supposed to be that color it’s just the diagram.’) But that would come later. Much, much later.

Taako didn’t have all that much power as a human.

 

* * *

 

 

Lup’s element was fire. It was her, it was her passion, it was her chaos and her nuance and her complicated interactions with everything around her. It was easier for her to rile up a crowd, or a bully. You wouldn’t notice it about her unless she cared, though. She was already too hurt for that, too jaded. She and her brother could joke back and forth for days, let insults from anywhere else slide off of them like rain down a window. 

But you  _ knew _ when she cared.

You would see the way her eyes would light up, you could hear the passion in her voice, the pure belief. If you pushed her too hard she would let you know exactly where the line you crossed had been drawn and how every inch after that was ash. Lup never knew, however, that it was literal.

Lup cared about a lot. If you didn’t know her well, it was a coinflip whether the kid in the cafeteria getting pushed into his plate would have her help him or point and laugh along with her twin. If you did, you knew her metrics. You knew this was funny and that was too far, this kid was helpless and the other was just asking for it. Although the two didn’t keep many friends at that age, so Taako may have been the only one keeping track.

When someone punched him in the shoulder outside school because they didn’t like him wearing his jewelry, you didn’t have to know her well to know this meant war. She tried to get the bully off of her brother, but just got knocked down to the ground. A dozen more punches later, on her back, elbows scraped and shoulder bruised, she didn’t look like a little girl who could do much. She could only really glare at him hoping her pure rage would turn to something, anything.

And then there was fire.

Only a little, she couldn’t really do much then. But before that boy knew it a small fire was steadily creeping up his collar, and no one noticed until his neck and hair were badly burned. All she needed to do was start a fire, it would grow on its own. Lup passed out on the ground afterwards, exhausted beyond belief, but they all learned something that day.

Lup learned most of her problems were flammable.

Everyone else learned if you hurt a hair on Taako’s head, you’ll burn for it.  
  


* * *

 

 

They ran away when they were sixteen. In a world largely without magic, transmutation and evocation weren’t exactly marketable skills. At least, not in the limited capacity they had them. They did odd jobs, ‘borrowed’ GED prep books from the library, tried to get somewhere as well as any sixteen-year-old could plan to. 

The years rolled by. Taako was saving up for culinary school and Lup was just about to start community college (although if one showed up in place of the other, hardly anyone would notice.) They cheated as much as the world let them, which meant Taako taking a whole day to transmute a ten dollar bill into a hundred dollar bill, and Lup keeping their small ‘house’ safe and warm.

It wasn’t a house per se. It was a small nook off an alley that they boarded up and turned into a small room and a bathroom. Everything in it was changed somehow, giving it a homey but still scattered look. Their textbooks doubled as half a table, while the word ‘clothes’ pretty much meant ‘soft place to lie down in the corner’. It wasn’t great, but it was home. 

It was supposed to be safe.

The twins were nineteen, walking home together from one of their part-time jobs. They didn’t exactly live on their own private property but it was generally known that you should stay away from their house, that those two were too strange and not nearly harmless enough. Someone didn’t get the memo.

Lup was always on her guard, so when someone laid a hand on her shoulder she was grabbing their wrist and turning around was fast as she could. That was until they stuck their  _ teeth _ into her  _ neck _ . 

Everything after that happened too fast. Lup tried to fight back only to feel like she was hitting solid cement. She had the sudden, awful realization that this was a  _ real life vampire _ drinking her blood. She heard a loud thud to her left. Her attacker waited a second longer, then dropped her. Something was burning, badly burning. Did she set  _ herself _ on fire? No, that wasn’t possible. She was more lightheaded than she’d ever felt in her life and she’d gone days without food before. She looked to her left and Taako was holding a metal pipe with a large head-shaped dent in the middle. Or he had been, until it fell to the floor with a clatter as the vampire moved on to him faster than she thought was physically possible.

Lup saw red.

There was a burning inside her, spreading now. Foreign and unnatural. There was another fire inside her, barely under control and about to burst. It didn’t matter which one she channeled, because either way, it was as easy for her now as striking a match.

Then suddenly, it was like she had set fire to gasoline. The fire spread to cover the vampire’s entire body. He tried to put it out with a speed Lup could barely keep track of, but she didn’t stop. She  _ pushed _ and the fire held its ground. What she was hoping was her brother’s not-dead-yet body fell to the ground.

Vampires, Lup learned that day, were highly flammable.  
  


* * *

 

 

Someone was screaming, was the first thing Taako registered. It was him. Possibly. Thoughts and burning didn’t go well together, neither did complicated realizations.

 

One: Lup’s crumpled form was lying against a wall next to him. His heart quite nearly stopped then and there, save for the fact that his brain jumped to the next point fast enough.

Two: The strange attacker ( _ who was a vampire?? _ ) was now on fire. Very much on fire. That at least meant his sister was alive. Well.

Three: He had been bitten by a vampire. She had been bitten by a vampire. Taako hadn’t brushed up on vampire lore in a while, but the fact that they were not dead tipped him off that something else might be going on. See point four.

Four:  _ Every part of his body was now very painfully burning and dear god if Lup hadn’t burnt the man to ashes already he would’ve strangled him to death. _

 

He tried moving. It didn’t hurt more, it couldn’t hurt more. There was a maximum amount of pain a person could physically feel and Taako was sure this was it. Moving, as soon as his brain processed both the pain and the request to move his limbs, wasn’t any more painful. But damn if that burning wasn’t severely distracting. He crawled a little closer to Lup.

She was still breathing, although very erratically. How long would it last? Was there a chance they’d die? Was there a chance only one of them would? Why didn’t they hand out brochures when you get accidentally turned into a vampire? He grabbed her hand and she didn’t respond. She probably knocked herself out with her fire trick, it happened. Maybe that was for the best. If she wasn’t awake maybe she wasn’t in pain. Taako wished he could knock himself out with his transmutation thing too, but it just gave him a headache. Not like he was worrying about headaches in his current state though.

He slowly tried to move them into their house. Their awful, awful little shack that might provide at least slightly more comfort than the stone ground. It took hours at that pace, Taako was sure the sun wasn’t in the sky when this all began. But they were finally on their small couch, and Taako had convinced himself that breathing through the pain might help at least a little. 

And then Lup woke up screaming. Neither of them could really form words then. Words were complicated, tiring things that pain distorted with a terrifying ease. Instead they just held each other tightly, desperately. 

Physically, it was the worst pain either of them had ever felt. Emotionally, part of them was so undeniably grateful that at least they weren’t alone. 

And they waited it out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm 100% just writing this for the sake of writing something. I'm also incredibly shy and this is definitely just some really really self-indulgent bullshit. So if you liked this... please just kind of forget about it for now. Maybe there'll be more updates, maybe there won't, I certainly don't know yet.


	2. CHAPTER II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry can't focus on his lecture. Lup makes plans. Taako needs a hobby.

Barry Bluejeans didn't consider himself a distractible person. He had his career path figured out when he was fifteen and got solid grades. He didn't go out to party on school nights. He took decent notes, maybe not the neatest and definitely more erring on the side of too many details than not enough. But he never trailed off into illegible scribbles or completely zone out during lessons. Well, not until now at least.

Because sitting two seats in front of him and one to the left was the most beautiful person Barry had ever seen.

That was an objective assessment. Not that he wasn’t attracted to her, he was _absolutely_ trying to get a glimpse of her face during his entire biology lecture. But the fact that she was breathtaking was just that, factual. Her skin was just a touch less dull than anyone else’s, somehow tan and freckled despite still looking like she had gotten just as little sun as anyone else in this dark, perpetually overcast town.

Her name was Lup. He learned that when the professor was taking attendance and fuck how did her voice sound like _chimes_?

It took him weeks to sit anywhere closer to her, though the rational part of his brain hated the ever-deteriorating quality of his notes and attention. He didn’t mind going over lecture slides again to make up for it. He did mind the fact that he apparently needed to make up for his nerdy high school years by hardcore crushing on the girl in his biology lecture. It was silly, wasn’t it? No one else was giving her much thought, but the closer he got to her the more interesting she seemed.

For one, she hadn’t taken any of the prerequisite courses. He gathered that from the single conversation he managed to have with her, where she told him she was auditing the class. And yet despite that, she had a puzzlingly good understanding of high level biology concepts. She never had trouble in pop quizzes, and she switched between seeming completely bored or wholly interested in the lecture depending on the topic.

Also her last name was apparently pronounced “taco”.

 

* * *

 

Vampire senses were strange.

They always seemed like they should be overwhelming, like they had no right to be anything else. Lup could feel _everything_ . She could hear heartbeats, she could smell imprints people left behind in rooms, she was so constantly _aware_ that it really should be annoying. The fact that it wasn’t frustrated her more. Her vampire brain was exceptional at handling all kinds of different stimuli all at once. Emotions were a bit different. She felt them more strongly, more truly, like each of them had been unsaturated and dull back when she was human. But she could just smooth most of them over if they bubbled up too much.

Most, but not all. Anger was a strong thing, and while she didn’t need it to fuel her gift, it still made it all that much more destructive.

Lup hummed to herself quietly on her way to class. Forty-something odd humans and a vampire walk into a lecture hall. It didn’t sound so much like a joke as a tragedy waiting to happen.

It’s not that Lup didn’t want to make friends; she did. Her circumstances just made the whole ordeal harder than it needed to be. Hours in a room together with any number of humans was bad, which made her biology lecture unbearable. She could barely afford to breathe, let alone talk.

She got lucky though. Her biology professor was one of those respected faculty members, the ones who’d get super pissy if you missed a class and gave a whole lecture about how half their class failed. No one really wanted to talk in that class.

But god, she was lonely.

Taako was great company and all, but he was still spending the first few years of his eternal life sulking, which wasn’t quite the vibe Lup was looking for. She took her seat in the lecture hall and pulled her notebook out of her bag. It’s okay, they had the rest of eternity to spend together, and Lup should really be able to boast having more than one friend. Looking around the room though, she highly doubted it would be here.

Her mind wandered as much as it could while also having perfect recall. Any memories formed as a vampire were crystal clear, even if she wasn’t paying attention, but her human memories weren’t as lucky. They were all foggy and fuzzy, although they didn’t technically deteriorate. They were basically just human software running on vampire hardware. One of the things left vulnerable was Elvish. It was just a silly secret language she and Taako developed as children, more out of necessity than anything else, but it was one of the few things Lup wasn’t comfortable leaving behind. They didn’t name it themselves; the other children at school came up with it as a joke, on account of their slightly pointed ears. No matter its origin, it stuck.

Which was why Lup used the less interesting lectures as a chance to document it. She didn’t technically need to write it, her new memory was _more_ permanent than any piece of paper could hope to be, but having some kind of document written in her and her brother’s language made it special. Real.

Lup processed in the back of her mind the professor saying something about a new project. As she was auditing the class she wasn’t required to turn in any assignments, but it gave her something to do. She appreciate the routine, the normalcy. Being a vampire was just one long, neverending day, which to be honest kind of sucked. Structure helped, turning in handwritten assignments helped, talking (no matter how infrequent) helped. Lup never wanted to feel like she was completely disconnected from her humanity; it kept her grounded.

An awkwardly folded paper airplane landed on her desk, drawing her out of her thoughts. She pinched it between her thumb and index finger, and noticed pencil marks in the middle. She carefully unfolded the paper.

 

“ _Would you like to partner up for the research project?_

 _-Barry_ ”

 

The “Barry” was unnecessary, she thought as she briefly turned around to look at him. The guy looked like he wanted to phase through the floor. She couldn’t really blame him, god knows she looked _killer_ even back as a human. And then vampires had that whole “perfect predator” schtick too, but she tried to keep her brain away from those thoughts.

Barry was one of the few people in the course who’d actually made an effort to talk to her. Not that she could comfortably carry on a long conversation here, but she was sure if he were aware of her situation he’d rather she stay quiet than risk murdering a room full of people. He was pretty much the epitome of everything normal and human, like one of those people on airline safety pamphlets except nerdier looking.

Also his last name was literally Bluejeans, which Lup found hilarious.

She almost wrote back “ _Passing notes in class? What is this, grade school?_ ” but stopped herself. She hadn’t talked to anyone, _really_ talked to anyone who was human in a long time. Maybe this wouldn’t be awful.

“ _Sure_ ” she scribbled on the back of the paper, “ _let me know when you wanna meet up_ ” then hesitated before writing down her phone number. She quickly, by human standards, folded the paper back into its airplane form and sent it flying back to where Barry was seated.

 

* * *

 

 

Taako thought this whole vampire thing sucked specifically for him.

Eternity sounded like a sweet deal at first, which all went down the drain when he realized his specific plans didn’t quite mesh with immortality. Not in the least.

First was the chef part of the equation, which he gave up on when he first tried to taste anything that wasn’t blood and his body reacted less than pleasantly. He _could_ cook, he could still physically taste things just fine, but what was the point of making anything if everything would seem disgusting to him anyways. Second was the celebrity part of “celebrity chef”, which was pretty much impossible now. He was immortal, he would never age, if he made himself too well known he’d be breaking the super important vampire secrecy law. It was the one thing in life he had planned and just like that, it was gone.

Okay, his transmutation stuff was pretty neat now too, but still.

Taako and his sister had gotten to where they were now largely because of his gift. It turns out money isn’t that hard to come by when you can turn dirt into gold with enough effort, and Taako certainly had the skill required for it. When they had the food-supply issue dealt with, the two of them bought a plot of land near a small overcast town and started working. They would have a real house now, one the two of them made the way they wanted, with separate bedrooms and at least two floors. A house that really felt like a home.

At least it would, Taako thought, when he was done with the roof first. At that moment he was on the aforementioned roof, following along with a YouTube tutorial. He and Lup decided that they would make this house themselves and they meant it. He was grateful for that choice, it gave him something to do. He rewinded the video a few seconds and squinted, trying to get a better look at something the person was holding. The squinting did nothing to improve his already impeccable vampire eyesight though, the video quality was simply too low.

He was done with maybe half the roofing when he heard Lup running up the dirt road to their house. They didn’t have a car yet, or rather they couldn’t afford any cars that ran any faster than they did. They’d need one just for their cover eventually, but for now they spent most of what they made on building supplies.

“The great Taako Taaco doing manual labor,” Lup tsked jokingly from below, “what has humanity come to?”

“How’s it looking from down there, _Lulu_?” he asked, looking down at her.

Lup wrinkled her nose at the nickname, and pretended to inspect the house from several angles.

“Hm. Seems fine to me, _Koko_ ,” she said. Taako made a face.

“Okay yeah no, nevermind, I’m disowning you,” he said, which got a laugh out of Lup.

Taako pushed himself back from the roof and landed on the grass below.

If he was honest with himself, the whole “settling down as vampires and getting a house somewhere” was more Lup’s style. Taako didn’t mind moving from place to place, it seemed safer as a whole. But he couldn’t deny there was a certain appeal to this. A stable house, a semi-normal life he could get used to, something _human_. He wasn’t that much of a fan of the food supply though.

That wasn’t a big moral thing; it’s just a fact, animal blood tasted objectively worse.

Lup cared more about feeling human, that was her compass. The thing with turning into a vampire is your morals tended to go pretty quick when your food supply consists of human blood, so they set ground rules before they moved. No hunting where someone could see you, no one nearby, and absolutely no innocents.

Those were more for him, really, given how much he complained about him and Lup going ‘vegetarian’, but he never really meant it. No matter how much it sucked, he never once came back with a higher human body count. This half life was already bad enough, he didn’t want his sister to be disappointed in him too, and he knew she would be.

The two of them walked into the house and Lup spread out her biology notes and diagrams across the floor. They didn’t have furniture yet on account of the house still being unfinished, but they didn’t need furniture the way humans did. You hardly needed anything as a vampire. That didn’t automatically make the floor any more comfortable though. Taako paid attention as Lup described in detail the most important parts. Vampire biology was different from human biology, which made changing anything that much more difficult. They learned that after an unfortunate trial where Taako had accidentally envisioned human cells while helping Lup transition, leading to a painful few minutes where venom turned those cells into vampire cells, not unlike actually turning. From that point forward they had been more careful.

There was nothing obvious left to change, just the little details that went into making a body function properly. They weren’t the most necessary, given that vampires bodies didn’t _do_ much of anything except move, but if they were wrong about that, neither wanted to find out the hard way.

“Don’t worry if I’m a little late tomorrow by the way,” said Lup, wrapping up explanations. That piqued Taako’s curiosity.

“You have plans?” he asked.

“Oh nothing really, just this group project thing for class,” she said

“Just you and a bunch of humans in a room for hours?” he questioned.

“Me and a bunch of humans in a room for hours is basically my class anyways. But no, it’s just this one guy,” she explained, picking up her papers. Taako spread out sideways on the floor, across half the papers.

“Guy?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her questioningly. She smacked him with the papers already in her hand until he rolled off the rest of the papers and let her collect them.

“His name,” she said, completely seriously, “is Barry Bluejeans.”

Taako stared at her for a moment before bursting into laughter.

“Holy shit, what? Nuh-uh, no way, that’s gotta be fake,” he said, “that’s like sitcom joke level fake, and I won’t let you distract me that easily. Spill.”

So he let Lup talk about her study partner and felt a pang of… something, in his chest. It wasn’t jealousy, that would be silly. He and Lup have the rest of eternity to spend together, no one could top that. Worry maybe? Humans were dangerous to be around. He trusted Lup, but he knew her well enough to know that if she made a mistake it would devastate her. But it’s nothing, just one human, even less risk than she takes on a daily basis. Maybe it was just something about her going off and living her ‘life’ while Taako kept himself busy working on the house at human speed.

Taako rolled over and stared up at the half-finished ceiling. If Lup could try to make a friend then he could at least try to do something new. Or maybe just something human. He just didn’t know what yet.


	3. CHAPTER III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taako tries being emotional support, Lup almost messes up, and there's something else lurking in the shadows.

Taako’s hand automatically reached up to pluck something from the air before it hit him. It registered in his brain a moment later. It was a surprisingly soft black shirt with some kind of ruffle around the sleeves.

“Hold that up for me?” said Lup from behind him. Taako rolled his eyes and turned to face her, holding the shirt against himself and striking a pose. She thought it over a bit then nodded, and Taako threw it back to her.

“We can get you a mirror,” he said, “we _do_ show up in those.”

“Less fun,” she said, ducking into another room to change.

The house was looking more finished now. They were at the stage where painting and color schemes were coming into play, which was partly Taako’s doing. Some of the pros of being a vampire (super speed, didn’t need to sleep, the whole shebang) meant that when Taako got serious about a project he could finish it faster than humans could ever dream, doubly so when Lup picked up on his energy.

She walked back out in the shirt and a red circle skirt, as well as a pair of ankle boots. That was different. Usually Lup just wore a hoodie and a pair of jeans to classes, it wasn't like the two of them had trouble drawing attention as is.

“What do you think?” she asked, fiddling with the waistband.

_“_ It gets the Taako stamp of approval,” he replied.

That didn't seem to make Lup act any less fidgety, which was saying something because those were Taako’s shoes, and they always made him feel ten times as confident.

“You're worried about your study sesh,” Taako guessed. Lup nodded.

“I… am basically a superglued cluster of sharpened knives, if knives could spontaneously combust,” she breathed.

“Hey, Lulu,” he said, walking up to her and setting his hands on her shoulders, “ _Lup._ It's gonna go fine. You need me to be backup?”

She shook her head. Taako’s physical transmutation powers aside, he could also influence people’s emotions and decisions just slightly. If things got out of hand he could hypothetically calm Lup down. Hypothetically. Lup didn't _like_ being calmed down through weird vampire tricks.

“No, I can do this alone. Besides, I don't think Barry’s that unobservant he won't notice my identical twin hovering around. I'll be fine once I'm actually there,” she said, determined.

Taako hugged her. Never let it be said that Taako couldn't take emotions seriously sometimes. Just sometimes… and when they were someone else’s emotions. Lup hugged him back tightly, still tense.

Neither of them had ever went into a situation where the bar for interacting with humans was any higher than “don't kill them”. Taako didn't think anything would outweigh the effort of constantly being on your guard, but he could only imagine how stressful it would be. He pulled away.

“Want me to walk with you downtown? I need to pick up paint anyways,” he said motioning to the samples.

“Yeah. Thanks, Taako. For being supportive and all,” she said.

“Don't sweat it, but just FYI you are absolutely not running any kind of distance in those boots or I _will_ disown you. Ruin your own shoes,” he said.

Lup smiled at him. She was going to be okay.  


* * *

 

 

Lup was doing very not okay.

She didn't realize how difficult it was to act human until she’d really tried it for the first time in close to a decade. Class was easy. No one really cared what she was doing as long as she looked like she was doing something related to the lesson, and even that she could get away with not doing. Hell, half the time she didn't even bother making it look like she was breathing. But now she had to breathe, a lot. And look around, and fidget, and carry on a normal conversation with another person. Why was she doing this again?

“So, um, why are you studying.. biology?” asked Barry, his tone of voice going up at the end as if he'd asked a yes or no question. They had just finished going over the outline for their project.

Lup faked taking a drink of her coffee. They were in this quiet coffee shop across from campus, which was ideal. Not crowded enough to put her on edge, not secluded enough that the vampire side of her brain could get any _ideas_ , and a small human thing she could do to add to her cover.

Just her luck that this was one of the most complicated questions to answer honestly. “I'm auditing a biology class because my twin brother didn't know enough about the human body to transmute mine properly” didn't really work.

“Oh you want my tragic backstory,” she asked jokingly and put down her coffee cup, “well, I'm transgender.”

“Oh-” Barry started, and Lup put up a hand to stop him.

“Not the tragic part,” she assured, “my brother and I basically grew up on our own though, so I couldn't exactly waltz into the doctor’s office as a kid. I ended up having to do a shit ton of research on hormones and dosages myself and, well, I ended up just liking biology.” None of these statements on their own were false. Lup _did_ like the class, which was why she went and not Taako himself. She also did have to figure out some her medical transition herself as a human.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I'm uh, pre-med,” he mumbled and lowered his eyes back to their outline.

Okay so maybe Barry wasn't generally the person who would carry along the conversation.

“C’mon, that was practically my life story there buddy, you gotta give me something,” Lup prodded. Her throat burned something awful. She could hear his heartbeat speeding up.

“M-my mother she uh, she almost died when I was twelve,” he said. Oh regret, regret!

“Oh shit, I'm sorry. You don't actually have to give me your tragic backstory that was a joke,” she said. He cracked a smile at that.

“No it's okay, really. She's fine now, I just had to keep her alive until an ambulance showed up, and  then one of the paramedics there said I had a talent for keeping people alive. I don't think she meant it seriously, but I’ve still wanted to go into medicine ever since,” he said.

That was… surprisingly touching, and also a shitty thing to have to go through as a kid, and Lup said as much. The two of them wrapped up working in the actual project for today.

“So do you maybe want to meet up again somewhere next week? For the uh, the project,” he stammered.

“Yeah sure, just let me know when,” she said, standing up from her chair.

Barry moved to do the same, but his foot slipped over a piece of paper that had fallen on the floor and been forgotten. Lup quickly reached out to steady him on instinct, and he flinched.

“You hands are really cold,” he said, worriedly.

Fuck fuck shit shit _shit_ , she's done it now! She really just could not go through a couple of hours of conversation without doing something that could too someone off.

“I, uh-” she tried to think of something to say.

“You should've told me you were feeling chilly, we could've moved to another table,” he said.

Oh.

“I wasn't. It's not a problem,” she said, “I just have poor circulation.” She tried giving him a smile, which she knew wasn't fair. Poor guy already struggled to get a sentence out to her sometimes, and she'd put _effort_ into looking nicer today, which wasn't nothing. She saw a blush creeping up his face and felt a moment of guilt.

Thank goodness for the human tendency to fit things into their own narrative.

The two of them parted ways outside the coffee shop. Okay, so that last part she definitely fucked up but, overall this didn't go badly. She had spent over an hour nearly alone with a human, she hadn’t gone all vampire murdermode, she brushed off her old conversational skills, and she actually got to know another person. This was… kinda fun.

Until Taako startled her by jumping out from behind a corner.

“Is that him?” he asked in a voice too low for humans, pointing to Barry.

“Yeah, and what happened to you needing to go buy paint?” she asked.

“Well, I still _need_ to. Never said I was planning to go while you were busy, you'll just have to come with me.”

Lup sighed.

“He's really a nerd, that one, isn't he?” said Taako.

“I'll fill you in on the way to the home supply store then I guess,” she said.

“He's got it bad, flustered as shit,” he said, completely ignoring what she was saying.

Lup made a short hum in agreement, wrapping her fingers around Taako’s forearm and dragging him in the general direction they needed to go.

“I mean you can't blame him, you don't look half bad.”

“Are you complimenting yourself again because we share a face?” she asked, although she knew the answer, “let’s go, we need to have a conversation about what the word ‘privacy’ means when you've got super senses.”

Taako made a disappointed noise, but let himself be led away.

“Were stuck together for eternity, you can't convince me that actually exists.”

 

* * *

 

At an unfamiliar bar, a man in a suit took a seat at one of their booths. It wasn’t the most reputable of establishments, but that was precisely why the location was chosen. Slowly, he ran his hand across the underside of the table and subtly removed an envelope taped there, placing it in his bag without as much as a look in its direction.

A woman in dark clothing took a seat in front of him. She seemed colder and sharper, if a person could be like a knife this woman was suitably deadly. She was wearing a wig, a fact no one but the man had keen enough eyes to spot. She smiled at him.

“I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t show up on time,” she said.

The man was perfectly punctual, and the two of them both knew it. He didn’t react to this outwardly, yet the woman grinned a bit wider.

“Teasing,” she said, and then her smile faltered, “not much time for humor these days anymore.”

“That’s not comforting to hear,” the man said.

“If the world was doing better you’d be out of work,” she pointed out, “but this one is… _interesting_.”

“How so?” he asked.

The woman paused and shifted her position, folding her arms closer to her and leaning more on the table.

“It’s something _new_ ,” she said at a pitch no one else could hear, saying it almost like the word “new” delighted her beyond belief, “you’ll read all about them soon enough, but some of the crew have started calling them Hunger Dolls.”

The man raised an eyebrow.

“That’s not ominous in the least,” he said sarcastically, but he didn’t look to be as playful anymore.

The woman slid out her seat, very energetic for someone who always looked so still. She placed one hand on the table, the tips of her fingers leaving the smallest indent in the wood. With her other hand she drew something from her bag, and placed it on the table. A single raven feather.

“Good luck, Kravitz. You’ll need it,” the woman said, all trace of humor gone, before casually walking away.

Kravitz stuck around a bit longer, ordering a drink at the bar. All the while, the nagging sensation that something was going very wrong refused to leave him.


	4. CHAPTER IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lup and Barry communicate, enter Angus McDonald.

****_Lup woke up on the cold floor, eyes blurry. Taako was already awake and sitting next to her with half the blankets wrapped around him. She reached out to touch him and he was freezing cold._

_“Taako,” she whined, frowning, “I can light the fire again, just tell me.”_

_She didn’t wait for his response, striking her thumb against her index finger for effect. She didn’t have to do it; it just helped her focus. In their small makeshift fireplace, a fire slowly yet steadily roared back to life._

_“You were sleepin’,” he said, his voice faint._

_Lup grabbed the blankets off of her and set them down over the both of them, wrapping an arm around her brother. The two of them looked no older than twelve, and the small shack that would slowly transform into a home for them still barely stood on its own then. Just wood planks next to brick walls hiding them away from the rest of the world._

_“Then wake me up, dingus,” she said._

_Neither of them said anything for a while, they just sat together and stared at the fire._

_“When we make it big we’re gonna buy like, these godawful fake fur coats,” said Taako, and Lup laughed, “try being cold in those bad boys.”_

_“What if the paparazzi spot you?” asked Lup. Taako faked thinking this over for a little bit._

_“Then we’ll have to get new ones, ‘cause you know if you wear anything twice the fashion police gets you.”_

_“And they take you to fashion jail?” she asked skeptically._

_“Hmph, now you’re just being silly, we all know famous people_ never _go to jail,” he said, “people like them too much, the entire justice system would collapse.” But it was Lup that collapsed in a fit of giggles._

 

They would never need the fake fur coats now, was all Lup could think, lying down on the dying grass. The first few snowflakes gently floated down from the sky, grey and cloudy as usual. Lup let herself be still, as still as she could possibly be, like she was nothing more than a rock on the ground. She felt the snowflakes land on her bare arms, not quite melting. They could feel the cold, but they could never again _be_ cold, or know human hunger. It was a blessing and a curse. They were safe now, they weren’t dying, their large beautiful house was empty but finished, just waiting for the two of them to wreak havoc and make it feel lived-in. But who were they if they weren’t working towards something? If they just existed.

“Jeez, and you think _I’m_ depressed,” said Taako from the doorway. Lup looked at him.

“What if I was just trying to commune with nature?” she asked, sitting up and shaking the remaining snow off of her.

“Bullshit, you lay down in dirt and started dissociating.”

“You ever think about how all of the goals we planned out as kids we’ve either done or are impossible to do and you don’t know what to do with yourself because you’re basically just mimicking what your human self would’ve done?” she asked.

He raised his eyebrows, which very clearly communicated “ _have you met me_?”

“How do you cope with it?” He brushed some of her hair to the side to make room, then dramatically lay down next to her.

“The answer is very easy,” he said, “which is that I don’t cope, ever. I’ve never coped with anything in my life and I don’t intend to start now.”

Lup hummed in understanding. A small ray of sunshine burst through the clouds and onto the grass next to them. She stuck her hand in the patch of sunlight, letting it reflect off of her skin in a million different directions. It was a kind of beauty that was never meant to take human form, so similar to the most breathtaking of crystals and so unlike human skin.

“I think… I might try to find a job,” said Taako.

Lup turned around to face him, confused.

“What, for real?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I mean I’ve gotta start doing _something_ soon,” he gestured to their house, “still don’t know what yet but it’s not like I’m running out of time.”

Suddenly, Lup tackled him into a hug, which would’ve suffocated Taako had he needed to breathe.

“What was that for?” he said, trying to pry her off.

“I’m proud of you,” she just said.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t push it,” he said, then paused to breathe when he realized his lungs had run out of air to speak, “sulking was only fun when you were around to do it with me. But now you’re “ _making friends_ ” and “ _having fun_ ” and shit. Cha’boy can take a hint.”

“Hey,” she said, frowning, “there’s no hint to take, Taako. You know no matter what, you’re the most important person in my life.”

“I mean one: you’re not alive, and two: I know, you don’t have to get all sappy,” he said, counting those off on his fingers for emphasis, “but eternity’s boring as shit when you have nothing to do, so Taako’s gotta find something to do.”

Lup sat back and looked like she was giving it some thought, then she stood up all of a sudden and grinned.

“Hey Taako,” she said, “check this out.”

And all of a sudden a beam of fire shot out of her empty palm and straight onto the previously snow-covered ground, clearing some of the snow and somehow setting some on fire.

Taako laughed, delighted by the sheer amount of fire, and asked her to do it again. Which she did, repeatedly.

There was no snow that night anywhere on the Taaco property.  


* * *

 

 

Barry was confused.

He wasn’t used to people giving that much attention to him. A few chuckles at his name, maybe, Someone asking him for notes or an explanation, understandable, he never missed a class. So at their next biology class, he couldn’t fathom that anything could or had changed. He would walk in there and Lup would be sitting hunched over her notebook like she always did, his professor would already be firing off questions and referencing their readings, and he would take a seat a few rows behind where there were less students and he could focus better. Except, it was a little different this time. He walked in, Lup was scribbling something in her notebook, and he went to take his seat. Then, as if she’d heard him somehow, she waved him over and moved her backpack from the chair next to her onto the floor.

She had saved him a seat.

Barry didn’t really know how to process this. They met up to work on the project, sure, but he wasn’t the best conversationalist by far, and Lup hadn’t been the type to socialize with… really anyone in their class. He sat down next to her, afraid she was going to try to make small talk or whisper back and forth or something, but they didn’t talk.

Instead they wrote notes.

It was strange, and seemed a bit childish at first, but he found it actually really comforting. She scribbled a question to him in an empty page of her notebook in a slanted, fast cursive, and then pushed it towards him. He, to his credit, didn’t scratch out five different wordings of the same answer, and she didn’t look over his shoulder while he wrote. He just passed it back to her, and they kept writing. Sometimes she’d doodle something to illustrate her point and he’d have to stop himself from laughing, sometimes he wrote down a really corny joke he regretted immediately but caught her biting her lip to keep from chuckling.

They were… friends?

 _“Do you play any instruments?”_ he wrote onto a piece of paper that day, and slid it towards her.

She was playing close attention to the lecture, mainly instructions for their next lab, that Barry had already went over in his own time. Her eyes very quickly glanced over the note, though. ‘ _Read at 10:43’_ Barry processed mentally and felt a smile creep onto his face. It didn’t take her long to swipe the paper towards herself in one swift motion

 _“Not since I was little. How about you?”_ she wrote back, and pushed the paper towards him.

 _“I’ve been trying to teach myself piano again. There’s this great song I’d like to try playing but I don’t know any violinists.”_ He passed the note back to her.

The professor directed them to open their textbooks to a certain page number, and both joined the rest of the class in shuffling their papers around. He barely noticed when she handed it back to him.

 _“It’s been years, but I could give it a shot-”_ There was one more letter, an ‘f’ maybe, that she had crossed out.

The other students started packing up, and Barry carefully folded the note and tucked it into his pocket.  


* * *

 

 

Angus McDonald, the world’s greatest soon-to-be detective, stepped off the bus somewhere near the center of the city. He carried with him two briefcase-like pieces of luggage, and a small pouch full off less-personal items. He was, after all, away here on business.

His grandfather had died only days before, and though Angus was upset he also saw an opportunity, this one in particular being the opportunity to run. There was nothing wrong with his old household, the remains of which he could assume was now meticulously being divided amongst its old inhabitants and extended family members, but he never truly belonged. Little boys his age didn’t attend high school, have senses as keen, or make deductions quite as quickly.

They also lacked, Angus had discovered early in his life, his complete and worrying indifference to the taste of human blood.

He glanced at the sky and then back down. His hunch had been correct about this at least, this city suffered from a lack of direct sunlight, which made it the perfect place to start his search. Despite the universal nature of night, and its perfect cover, he couldn’t imagine vampires found hiding away for half their existence pleasant.

Vampires, the word still made him shudder. Vampires weren’t _supposed_ to exist, they defied every law he knew about existence, and were just all-around too overpowered to be true. Angus had ran into a few before, people whose heartbeat he couldn’t hear, blood he couldn’t detect. A few ‘kind’ ones had taken a few minutes to talk to him. They hadn’t known exactly what he was, vampires apparently weren’t too big on vampire science, but they could make a few guesses. His blood smelled ‘off’ to them, almost human but not quite, they probably wouldn’t drink it unless they were particularly desperate (which, while honest, was a terrifying thing to hear as an eight-year-old). He was safe, or at least safer than most of the population, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was yet.

So here he was, as close to perfect cloud cover as he could get on what little money he took with him. What exactly he was doing he wasn’t sure yet, given that this was the most impulsive plan Angus McDonald had ever devised, but he had a hunch. He may have incredible deductive skill, but his hunches were near-supernaturally accurate. Considering what he was here to find out, that wasn’t too wild a theory. He needed to find a vampire, and until then he could come up with questions to ask.

He just hoped he’d live long enough to get his answers.


End file.
